Population, Health and Nutrition in the Sahel

Issues in the Welfare of Selected West African Communities

Allan G. Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136882845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

This collection of studies, first published in 1985, describes some contemporary problems of selected pastoral and agro-pastoral communities of the West African Sahel. Several important features of the Sahel are illustrated: the significance of seasonal factors in causing periodic stress amongst people and animals, the economic uncertainty introduced by interannual climactic variations, as well as the role of traditional systems of social and economic organisation in providing some support during periods of need.

The findings presented here are published in co-operation with the Sahel Institute, a regional research organisation set up in the early 1970s with representation from eight Sahelian countries – Cape Verde, Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Upper Volta.

CHAPTER 1

ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF THE DEMOGRAPHY OF SAHELIAN PASTORALISTS AND AGRO-PASTORALISTS

Allan G. Hill and Sara Randall

Introduction

Pastoral peoples have long held a powerful fascination for western writers who have sought in nomadic society both romance and mystery, as well as the repository of laudable characteristics believed lost in the West, such as independence, stoicism in the face of physical adversity, and a strong sense of loyalty to family and to tribe. The settled populations in Africa and the Middle East have a less rosy but nonetheless equally idealized stereotype of nomadic pastoralists more in line with say, European perceptions of gypsies; that is, the settled groups think of the nomads or gypsies as aimless wanderers, immoral, promiscuous and disease-ridden as a result. Both perceptions of the way of life of pastoralists misrepresent the reality of living by rearing animals; small wonder that frequently the development planner’s ‘solution’ to the perceived poverty or low productivity of livestock herders has been to settle them and to try and integrate them into a mixed farming economy (see Teitelbaum, 1977 for a Senegalese illustration).

Much academic work on pastoralists has reflected these myths by considering pastoralists as populations apart, as isolated groups, who, by dint of being pastoralists and nomadic, are intrinsically different from other social groups. This has tended to lead to theoretical approaches that examine the concept of pastoral society as opposed to non-pastoral society, with different principles of organization and behaviour. Overcoming these misapprehensions about pastoralists was one of the aims of the American Anthropological Association’s Symposium on nomadic societies held in 1969. In the volume of proceedings edited by Irons and Dyson-Hudson, ‘Perspectives on nomadism’ (1972), Dyson-Hudson critically reviewed the literature on nomads published up to that date and emerged with a plea for more detailed study of particular nomadic societies and their means of subsistence, and produced an eight-point research agenda for the future. Since then, at least three other major symposia have been held and three large volumes published as a result (Monod, 1975; L’équipe écologie et anthropologie des sociétés pastorales, 1979; and Golaty et al., 1981). The anthropological literature on pastoralists has burgeoned in the 1970s and for the first time both individuals and institutions (see Coulomb et al., 1980 and the International Livestock Centre for Africa’s reports) have set about the task of systematically collecting quantitative data on pastoralists and their herds. The approach underlying much of the work in the 1970s was holistic, the aims being to integrate numerical and non-numerical data, data on animal productivity, herd management, kinship, inheritance and social organization to give a more complete picture of the group under study. Some impetus for this has also come from official channels; major international assistance agencies now demand some kind of ‘social soundness’ analysis before a major development scheme of any kind is fully implemented.

None of the developments described above is undesirable but some are undoubtedly impractical. There are always some conceptual and theoretical problems to be faced in any programme of comparative research, but when dealing with pastoralists there are additional problems of definition in the analysis. A few of these are discussed later in the book, but for the moment, the most important item is to clear up some problems of description which have crept into studies of pastoral communities.

First, we must face the terminological difficulties caused by dealing with concepts as loose as ‘nomads’ and ‘nomadism’. Implicit in these terms is a belief in a dichotomization of human life styles into (a) nomads - those without a permanent dwelling-place, who are generally hunter-gatherers or livestock herders and (b) the settled population who usually either farm or work in urban-based activities. This analytical split between the ‘desert and the sown’ exists only in the mind of the analyst rather than being a reflection of reality. The division has misled people for decades, forcing some field workers to search for characteristic features of two groups of societies perceived as separate, and to compare and contrast them as if they had developed autonomously and independently from each other. Let us hope that the lesson has now been learned; the classification of cultures (or indeed of any idea or set of objects) is not an end in itself but is designed to assist in development of theories and explanations by simplifying the daunting complexity of the original. Good classifications are only good insofar as they are based on significant attributes, i.e. they divide groups using attributes integrally related to the functioning and development of the items being classified. The fact that some populations live in tents and move whilst others live in permanent dwellings, turns out in most cases to be as irrelevant to an explanation of the functioning of pastoral societies as the classification of people into right- and left-handers would be for the understanding of modern industrial society. Thus, the study of nomads and the search for generalizations across communities as different from each other as the Lapps of Finland are from the WoDaaBe of Niger classified together simply because they are mobile, is bound to be a largely wasted search, and one which has in general held up the development of studies of pastoral communities.

A second idea which has led to confusion in the past was that herders, farmers and townspeople were separate kinds of communities that, apart from the exchange of goods and services, had few points of social contact and little common economic organization. This we now recognize as false, thanks to the evidence from a variety of sources; in Mali, Niger and Senegal salaried civil servants invest in animals and livestock rearing, with the traditional herdsmen acting as paid shepherds rather than as subsistence-oriented, stock-owning pastoralists. Teitelbaum (1977) describes the case of the Soninke’s employment of Fulani herders, and the Dogon of Mopti Region in Mali also use hired Fulani herdsmen. Pastoralists and their economies should no longer be considered in isolation; a purely pastoral mode of living is now extremely rare both in Africa and the Middle East where, in every case, the long established economic specializations by ethnic group are breaking down.

A third misapprehension, which has in the past affected the outside world’s regard for pastoralists, is that they are inefficient and high cost producers of meat, milk and other animal products. With the collection of more detailed information on the pastures of the Sahel and similar areas, with matching data on herd productivity, we now know that the production of pastoralists in relation to available natural and human resources and to the capital employed is quite impressive, even though on a per capita basis the milk yield of a Sahelian Zebu cow pales into insignificance besides that of a stall-fed Friesian in Holland (ILCA, 1981). Pastoralists should no longer be seen as the living proof of the outmoded theory of climatic and ecological determinism so popular amongst geographers and anthropologists until the 1950s. Studies in Mali and Niger have shown that subsistence herders show a keen awareness of market factors and may adjust their management strategies to achieve specified aims, including mere survival of people and animals in times of hardship, increased productivity over the long or the short term, or adjustments in the quality and quantity of the livestock as circumstances demand, although animals and animal ownership also retain a cultural non-economic role (see Chapter 6 for some effects of different forms of herd management).

These three recent changes in attitudes and approaches to pastoralists by both academics and by administrators and planners can be summarized thus:-

1. more accurate descriptions of real situations unclouded or less clouded by pre-conceived notions about the merits or demerits of livestock herding;

2. a realization that farmers and pastoralists are part of the same economy affected by similar market and non-market forces;

3. an appreciation that herders are productive people when seen in the appropriate context and that they are decision-makers rather than living a mechanistic existence determined by culture and environment, both of which, in the past have been assumed to be near-constant.

The changes in attitudes and approaches summarized above are important for all kinds of studies of pastoralists since their collective effect is to bring pastoral studies into the mainstream of discussions about use and development of human and natural resources in poor countries. So that herders become less marginal in both a political and an economic sense, the same models, the same logic and the same rationality should be applied to the analysis of their behaviour as we would apply to an examination of the economy of dry land millet farmers or cultivators of irrigated rice. Having animals is not simply a quirk of culture stemming from what Dupire called ‘cow mania’ amongst the Fulani; it is a measured, reasonable response in the circumstances, given the resources available. It is in this spirit that we propose to approach the analysis of the demographic behaviour of pastoralists and the one we recommend others to follow in future. Before turning to details to be discussed elsewhere, there are some theoretical issues to be touched at the outset.

Theoretical issues in the study of the demography of pastoralists

Whether the subjects of study are pastoralists, farmers or urban wage earners, the problems of conceptualization of the issues and the reduction of the complexity of reality to a few simple hypotheses are omnipresent. In demography, we are still uncertain about the position of fertility and mortality in the social and economic system of the society concerned. Are birth and death rates simply a by-product of the way men and women organize their productive lives together in a particular socio-economic context? Does the means of subsistence and its technology impose constraints on a society which pre-determines its fertility and mortality levels? Are contemporary birth and death rates largely a legacy from the past? Are traditional societies controlling both birth and death rates to ensure a particular rate of population growth or does the basic desire for children and the perpetuation of one’s genes swamp all other thoughts of adusting population size to available resources?

These and other important questions were considered by Malthus, Smith and Ricardo over a century ago but no universal answers are likely to be forthcoming. This has not prevented several authors writing about population and resources as if the arithmetic rate of food production and the geometric rate of population growth were the only two factors to be considered in the future welfare of modern as well as traditional societies. The approach has been especially crude with reference to a few simple economies, amongst them pastoral ones. Some concessions are made about the possibility of the operation of ‘preventative’ in addition to ‘positive’ checks in traditional society (e.g. the possible function of marriage as a factor in restricting fertility in societies where the bulk of childbearing occurs within marriage). But the impossibility of calculating net reproduction rates for both animals and humans in either the long or short run has not dissuaded some writers from thinking in wholly Malthusian terms about the ability of herders to see connections between the growth of their herds and the growth of the number of mouths which rely on animals for their livelihood. Any student of Sahelian societies knows that inter-annual and inter-seasonal variations are so marked that any long term trend in either animal or human populations are probably indecipherable in anything shorter than a generation or two and by this time the key decisions will for the future have already been made.

Two additional points are worth making about ‘Malthusian’ attempts to interpret the fertility behaviour of traditional societies, including pastoral groups. First, although many Sahelian pastoral societies continue to operate along largely traditional lines, they are not untouched by the outside world in forms such as international prices for agricultural and pastoral commodities as well as for labour. The colonial period and the introduction of the taxation system broke down any remaining economic isolation of pastoralists in West Africa during the inter-war period some fifty years ago. Secondly, Sahelian pastoral communities (and indeed most pastoral groups) are not closed populations i.e. populations with little or no in or out-migration. They are amongst the most ‘open’ societies in West Africa. Dupire (1962) observed how frequently herders move in and out of a pastoral way of life, altering their life style from a fully animal-based economy to a completely agricultural existence within the space of a few years. They have to be flexible, since they deal with farmers and other herders on the one hand, and government personnel, merchants and other townsmen on the other, speaking several other languages in addition to their own, thereby acquiring much knowledge about a larger world, and modifying their attitudes and behaviour accordingly. For these reasons, it is hard to envisage a situation in which a shortage of pastures would directly lead to a behavioural response, such as a reduction in fertility by delaying marriage, control of marital fertility or even by neglecting young children to a degree verging on infanticide. Any behavioural responses which led indirectly to fertility reduction, such as increased spousal separation necessitated by increased herding commitments, would in almost every instance be too late to deal with the immediate crisis. No-one knows much about the long term, given the lack of good records and the rapid pace of social and economic change in contemporary West Africa. There are in any case so many other more acceptable ways for herders to deal with crisis periods including selling animals, relocation, temporary abandonment of herding for wage labour in agriculture or in towns, or even resort to force of arms.

An often overlooked dimension of the herding economy with its characteristic seasonal and annual crises is that these difficulties are not evenly spread throughout the whole herding population. On the one hand, the variability of rainfall both in amount and geographical distribution is considerable especially where total amounts are low (see p.15 of the Atlas du Mali, ed. Traoré, 1980). On the other, herding societies may be stratified into classes or status groups, each of which can be differentially affected by periods of stress. For the Kel Tamasheq, there is evidence that Bella respond quite differently to difficult periods and years than do the ‘free’ Tamasheq; the same is true of the Fulani castes and of the Fulbe and their agricultural dependants. For any pastoral population there is unlikely to be a single reproductive strategy which is optimal for all, even assuming that some optimum plan could somehow be discovered by methods unspecified.

On a general level, one of the most interesting conclusions to emerge from a study of the pastures of the Sahel in recent years is that in general, the pastoral resources of the region are not over-used and even in special situations where grazing pressures are intense (e.g. around water sources in the dry season), the grasses are often capable of a full recovery given adequate rainfall and a temporary easing of grazing pressures, although both of these requirements are often difficult to meet (ILCA, 1981). This gives the lie to those who write of the advance of the Sahara desert southwards into the Sahel as a kind of ineluctable process arising from the positive increase rates for both animal and human populations.

An additional point which further depreciates any Malthusian approach to the understanding of the demography of pastoralists is the immense difficulty of defining stable production and consumption units for such adaptable societies. The concept of the ‘household’ has little meaning in many pastoral societies with consequent difficulties for the study of any accounting systems. For whom would a rise or fall in human fertility be advantageous? The question is unanswerable when the reference group for accounting purposes is undefined or at least subject to frequent changes. One characteristic of Tamasheq society noted by Randall and Winter in Chapter 8 is its fluidity; disagreements may lead to division of households and camps rather than there being any attempt to heal splits because of deeply entrenched financial or other interests. Clearly, the mobility of both the capital (animals) and the people themselves in pastoral societies is one reason for their flexibility compared with settled peasant populations.

Once we move beyond the simplistic and refutable view that herders are mechanically responding to ecological pressures (Horowitz, 1975; Asad, 1970; Bernus, 1981), the shortcomings of many of the ecologically-based models become clear. Swift’s (1979a) work on the basic parameters of the Tamasheq pastoral economy in the Adrar n’ Iforas showed how important choice (based on economic calculations) was in shaping herd composition and management strategy. Others adopt more theoretical positions. Marxist anthropologists and economists in their analyses of both traditional and modern societies, place the technical division of labour, forms of appropriation and means of production in a central position in the determination of the social process of production. Godelier (1975) in a discussion centred on Australian Aboriginals and Kalahari Bushmen, indicated how the essential division of labour could affect the prevailing demographic regime (Figure 1.1).

On a different tack, some recent work on herd models by Dahl and Hjört (1976) is beguiling in that it produces plausible figures for herd growth and structure based o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of drawings
• Preface
• Editor’s Introduction
• Chapter 1: Issues in the study of the demography of Sahelian pastoralists and agro-pastoralists
• Chapter 2: The recent demographic surveys in Mali and their main findings
• Chapter 3: The enumeration of nomads and semi-nomads: methodology and selected results from the 1976 census of Mali
• Chapter 4: A demographic profile of the Fulani of central Mali with special emphasis on infant and child mortality
• Chapter 5: Demographic characteristics and trends amongst the nomads of Mauritania
• Chapter 6: Mixed herding and the demographic parameters of domestic animals in arid and semi-arid zones of tropical Africa
• Chapter 7: Land tenure practice and development problems in Mali: the case of the Niger Delta
• Chapter 8: The reluctant spouse and the illegitimate slave: marriage, household formation and demographic behaviour amongst Malian Tamasheq from the Niger Delta and the Gourma
• Chapter 9: Child mortality and care of children in rural Mali
• Chapter 10: Nutrition amongst a group of WoDaaBe (Fulani Bororo) pastoralists in Niger
• Chapter 11: Preliminary findings on the diet and nutritional status of some Tamasheq and Fulani groups in the Niger Delta of central Mali
• Chapter 12: Assessing the components of seasonal stress amongst Fulani of the Seno-Mango, central Mali
• Chapter 13: Design of a food intake study in two Bambara villages in the Ségou Region of Mali with preliminary findings
• Chapter 14: The health of nomads and semi-nomads of the Malian Gourma: an epidemiological approach
• Chapter 15: The World Fertility Survey: questionnaires and analysis with special reference to Africa
• References
• About the authors
• List of Participants at the meeting on the Demography, Social Structure and Welfare of Sahelian Pastoral and Agro-pastoral Communities, Bamako, 24–27 January 1983
• Index